Mondo Knows Facts
Greenland's name was a recruiting tool
The name is usually credited to Erik the Red, who wanted settlers to join him there Icelandic sagas say Erik, exiled from Iceland, named the land Greenland to make it sound attractive. Most of the island is ice, though the sheltered fjords of the south-west do have green pasture in summer. The name stuck even as the Norse settlements disappeared in the fifteenth century. It sits in Mondo's world geography collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Norse Greenland lived on walrus ivory exportsScandinavian settlers farmed a harsh coast and hunted walrus for European churchesGreenland is the largest non-continental island in the worldCovering over two million square kilometres, roughly eighty per cent of Greenland is blanketed by a permanent ice sheet.Istanbul has carried three famous namesIt was Byzantium, then Constantinople, and became Istanbul officially only in the twentieth centuryThe Caspian is named for a people long goneIts name comes from the Caspi, a group recorded in antiquity, not from any present-day nationMany capitals have been renamed since independenceSalisbury became Harare, Lourenço Marques became Maputo and Léopoldville became KinshasaSeveral Indian cities reverted to local namesBombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai and Calcutta became Kolkata between 1995 and 2001
🗺️ World Geographyfact 196 of 200
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Tags: place-names, greenland, norse
Greenland's name was a recruiting tool: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The name is usually credited to Erik the Red, who wanted settlers to join him there. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a world geography fact?
- Yes. It sits on the World Geography shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.